A Child's Christmas in Sweden and Other Memories

By Earl Anderson

At age twenty-three, Goran Bixo emigrated to northern Minnesota, armed with an engineering degree from Katrineholm. His young sister, Ruth, in a memoir, remembers him and their grandfather, "Iorn Anners" (Iron Andersson), for songs and stories at Christmastime. As a child, Goran survived rheumatic fever. He almost died of Spanish flu in 1918. By day in Duluth, he repaired tracks for the streetcar company. By night, he studied English and citizenship at Denfeld High School. He was popular as a vocalist, having been taught by his father, Bengt Bixo, the "Violin King of Morsil." His goal was to be a gud nykommer, an ideal newcomer. In letters home, he recounts immigrant experiences in details that are witty, astute, and optimistic in times of adversity. In Sweden and North America, the documents in this book have circulated in the family for years. After a century, it is time to open them to the world in English translation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662483639

Book preview

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A Child's Christmas in Sweden and Other Memories

Earl Anderson

Copyright © 2022 Earl Anderson

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-8361-5 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-8363-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

A Child's Christmas in Sweden: Ruth Bixo's Life on the Farm

Nels Anderson: Letters to a Prospective Immigrant (1923–1925)

Så gott som nykommare: Göran Bixo's Letters from Minnesota

Appendix I

Nels Anderson's Letters to Göran Bixo (1923–1925)

Appendix II

Göran Bixo's Letters from Minnesota (1925–1928)

Appendix III

Ruth Bixo's Memories of Göran

Bibliography

About the Author

To the Swedish and North American descendants of Märta Andersdotter and Göran Ersson of Gunnilvallen

Other books by Earl R. Anderson:

The Civil War Diary of William Biss 1861–1864: 16th Wisconsin Infantry, Pioneer Corps

Postmodern Artistry in Medievalist Fiction. McFarland, 2018

Friendly Fire in the Literature of War. McFarland, 2017

Understanding Beowulf as an Indo-European Epic. Edwin Mellen Press, 2010

Folk-Taxonomies in Early English. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003

A Grammar of Iconism. FDUP, 1999

Cynewulf: Structure, Style, and Theme in his Poetry. FDUP, 1983

Märta Andersdotter by her farmhouse in Gunnilvallen, 1841

Batte Olsson's painting of Bibi Nordin playing Mārta Andersdotter in Husåspelet

Photo: Marilyn Anderson

Göran Bixo (1922)

Family photo collection, courtesy of Arne Bixo

Bengt Bixo (1960)

Family photo collection, courtesy of Arne Bixo

Deer hunting on the farm in Leander, November 1916

Nels Anderson (left), sons Arvid (right), and Oscar (seated)

Family photo collection

Nels Anderson by the bridge over Rice River

on his farm in Leander, 1920

Family photo collection

Preface

When I was ten and my brother Stan was nine, our family moved to a farm that my folks bought from our father's best friend, Mel Soneson, who was then a theology professor at North Park College in Chicago. The farm wasn't, strictly speaking, a homestead. It was carved out of forestland that Nels Soneson, a free church Swedish pastor, purchased from Duluth, Winnipeg, and Pacific Railroad in the 1930s.

The barn, built by Nels Soneson, had a hayloft that doubled as a one-hoop basketball court and for storage because the boys a generation before us, Mel and Jon Soneson, stashed their parents' belongings there in cardboard boxes. We weren't supposed to, but Stan and I snooped in the boxes, where we found a battered Swedish Bible and a Biblisk historia with adventure tales like the ones in Boy's Life magazine, quite unlike the moral admonitions in Sunday-school booklets. Later in life, I learned that Biblisk historia was used by children for reading for the pastor (läsare för prästen) as confirmation was called back in the day of Swedish dairy farms. Anyways, I spent time with both books, trying to learn Swedish.

One day, Jon Soneson—by then a Baptist preacher in Iowa—came to the farm to retrieve his family's belongings. He kept the confirmation book. Stan and I watched him torch the Bible in our burning barrel, on a path halfway between the farmhouse and an outdoor privy, nestled in a raspberry patch and abandoned to hornets.

Every age sweeps things away. The barn and the farmhouse met the same fate as the Bible, both torched by lightning. The fields and the meadow lie fallow. On my father's side, all that's left is a family photograph and a wooden immigration trunk, restored by my youngest brother Jim. And a Cook Co-op Creamery milk can—one that my grandfather, Oscar Anderson, used to collect milk from dairy farmers. My most prized possession, bought for five dollars at an auction in the Ojibwe town of Orr.

I had to return to the ancestral homeland in Jämtland for the documents collected in this book. I present them as cultural preservation, as they recall the experience of an immigrant in the 1920s: Göran Bixo (1901–1928), who came to Amerika armed with an engineering degree from Katrineholm, in search of employment, perhaps in the underground Soudan mine on the Vermilion Range, where his great-uncle, Nels Anderson (Nils Andersson, 1854–1929), had worked when it was an open-pit mine called Breitung.

As we are looking backward, I'll allude to the documents in reverse. In chapter 3, Göran relates details of his voyage across the Atlantic, his experience on Ellis Island, his train ride to Minnesota, and his life in Cook and Duluth, in letters home to his family in Bye, Mörsil, a farming settlement forty miles northwest of Östersund. In chapter 2, Nels Anderson (Göran's great-uncle) offers advice about travel and prospects for employment on the Iron Range. During a visit in Åkersberga, Anders Bixo (Göran's youngest brother) gave me the letters and an admonition to translate them for readers in North America.

What of the family back home? How did his parents, Bengt Bixo and Kerstin Göransdotter, and how did his siblings feel about Göran leaving home? He was the only Bixo who went to America. They worried about his health as he had survived a childhood battle with rheumatic fever, and he almost died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. His sister, Ruth Bixo, remembered Göran as robust and cheerful; but she was a little girl, and Göran was her favorite brother. In chapter 1, Ruth shares her memories of Göran, especially at Christmas, in a memoir composed a half century after his death. Her text was translated by her son, Erik Månsson of Svardsjö (near Falun), offered here in edited form.

Introduction

Göran Algot Bixo was born July 30, 1901, as the second child of Bengt Bixo and Kerstin Göransdotter. He was born and raised in Bixogården, the family farm in Bye, walking distance from the church and school in Mörsil. As a second son, he took the name of his mother's father, Göran Andersson. Swedish men often went by their middle names because naming customs led to the duplication of a small corpus of given names, but Göran never called himself Algot.¹

In 1890, Göran Andersson and his wife, Gölin, moved from the copper-mining village of Fröå to the farmlands in Mörsil. There, he built a hotel and, in winter, made charcoal in the forest for sale to local farmers. In retirement, he was caretaker (kyrkovaktare) in the Swedish church and school, and a frequent visitor at Bixogården.² Kerstin (Göran's mother) was his only child. At Christmas, he amused grandchildren by impersonating Jul Tomte (Christmas elf, Santa Claus) and regaled grown-ups with tales about Märta Andersdotter and other ancestors, for Jul was a time for reflection on family history. Grandpa Göran walked awkwardly in oversized shoes, an idiosyncrasy that Ruth explains in her memoir.

In April 1925, Göran went to Cook, Minnesota, where he stayed on Nels Anderson's homestead in Leander. He hoped to find work on the Iron Range, but after two weeks, he gave up that idea and moved to Duluth, where Bengt Johnson (a cousin of Bengt Bixo) found him a job with the Duluth Street Railway. From April 1925 to summer 1926, he lived with Bengt and Anna Johnson at their home, 4217 West Fifth Street, a half mile from the harbor. From there, he moved to a boarding house at 614 North Thirty-Ninth Avenue West, a few blocks away. In August 1928, at age twenty-seven, he died in St. Luke's Hospital under circumstances that appear in Ruth Bixo's memoir and in his own collection of letters.

In summer 1993, several Bixo relatives and spouses toured America, driving a van from New York to San Francisco. Among them were Anders Bixo (his youngest brother), Anita Bixo (Winnipeg), Arne Bixo (Fränsta), and Erik Månsson (Svärdsjö). The first half of their journey was a pilgrimage. They drove from New York to Duluth by way of Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago, retracing the route that Göran took by train in 1925.

In Duluth, they visited First Covenant Church, St. Luke's Hospital, and his gravesite in Oneota Cemetery. Then they drove ninety miles north to see Nels Anderson's homestead, at this time known as the Forsline farm. Their only regret was that they hadn't brought Göran's letters with them, so they couldn't find the homes in west Duluth where Göran had lived. Leander Road was unmarked at that time, and Forsline Road didn't yet have a name. Perhaps someone in Cook told them to cross the railroad tracks at the old Rice River water stop and turn left at the next road. Ten years later, when I spoke to them about their journey, I didn't have the heart to tell them that they passed by Leander Farm on the left and Hillside Cemetery on the right, where Nils Andersson was reburied after the cemetery in Tower was closed for development, and who knows what happened to the body of his soulmate, Anna Blom? Leander Farm, by the way, is recognized by the state as the oldest farm in Minnesota to be operated continuously by one family.

Göran's memory inspires maternal and paternal instincts in the older generation. At family reunions, when Göran Bixo is mentioned, the crowd responds with reverential silence. Göran signifies family values just as his second-great-grandmother, Märta Andersdotter (again, in Ruth's memoir) signifies family pride.

Bixogården, the farm where Bengt Bixo grew up and raised ten children, formerly was called Backgården, Hillside farm. Farm names were used to disambiguate patronymics, so when Bengt Bixo's paternal grandfather, Jonas Larsson (1816–1894), married Karin Pehrsdotter (1815–1899, who inherited Backgården, he took the name Jonas Larsson Back. Their son, Erik Petter Jonsson Back (1843–1892)—Göran's paternal grandfather—took Bixo as a surname when he served in the army. Bixo is a Swedish adaptation of the first compound element in Italian besoglieri, sharpshooter. (Other sources derive bixo from Italian picchio, woodpecker, a possible phonology, but this etymology requires some unlikely semantic acrobatics.) Around 1840, Backgården became Bixogården.

Another military name in the family was Öst (east). Anders Öst (1762–1839) was a third-great-grandfather on Göran's mother's side, a cavalry officer (dragon, dragoon), and first in the family to settle in Gunnilvallen on a beautiful hilltop farm overlooking a lake and a forest. There, Anders Öst herded goats and was known locally as gammalvallen, the old herdsman of the valley.

Military surnames have a curious history dating to the fourteenth century or earlier. Because the corpus of given names and patronymics was small, there were many duplications in a provincial army or cavalry. It wouldn't do to have five men named Erik Larsson, three named Olof Nilsson, and so on. To disambiguate the names, each provincial army and cavalry kept a roster (rota) of names based on fauna, flora, topography, weaponry, personal attributes, or local origins. Here are some examples (restricted to Göran's maternal ancestry): Örn (eagle), Wulf, Fargalt (wild boar), and Bröms (barnacles); Edfors (forceful rapids), Forslund (forest rapids), Berg (mountain), and Råå (frontier); Boman (archer) and Bång (noise of gunfire). Other fairly common names (not in the family) are Flink (adroit), Knapp (short), Lång (tall), and Stark (strong).

The men didn't choose their names. When they were inducted into service, they were assigned to a name on the roster. When they left the service, some men kept their military names as surnames, as happened with Erik Petter Jonsson Back, who became Erik Bixo. Men who lived in rural areas reverted to patronymics. Others, like Anders Öst, kept the military name but didn't pass it down to descendants. Thus, Anders Öst's daughter was Märta Andersdotter (1799–1883), Göran Bixo's second-great-grandmother, who was a legendary figure in family history, as were her youngest son, Per Göransson (1841–1926), the Paul Bunyan of Gunnilvallen, and his wife Katrina Hinriksdotter (1840–aft. 1936), locally known as the Bear Lady (björnkvinna) because she survived being mauled by a bear in the forest. Modern historians of Jämtland cite Märta as an icon of frontier culture in the foothills, just across the mountains from Trondheim (Ullberg 1967, 412–13; Hedros 1995, 28).

Erik Petter Jonsson Back (later Bixo) married Margareta Danielsdotter (1847–1905); her father was Daniel Bengtsson (b. 1792). Bengt Bixo (1879–1962), their second son, by custom took the name of his maternal grandfather. I know nothing more of this family, except that Erik Petter and Margareta had a daughter who died young: Karolina Ersdotter Bixo (1871–1891).³ When Göran Bixo grew up in Bixogården, the only relatives that he knew were on his mother's side. His namesake, Göran Andersson (1851–1936), and his wife, Gölin Andersdotter (1849–1918), were his only living grandparents.

Bixo is an unusual surname in Sweden. Like Studebaker in North America, almost all people who have it are related, either by blood or by marriage.

Göran's father, Bengt Bixo, was known as the Violin King of Mörsil. He played polkas and folk tunes on tour and improvised tunes of his own, sometimes adapting music from movies. He was a farmer, the proprietor of Bixogården, but as late as 1927, he supplemented the family income by playing violin at silent movies, accompanied on piano by Manne Andersson of Tessberg. He had a comic wit and composed or adapted folktales in one of the rustic dialects of Jämtland. Bengt was a vocalist, too, and conducted a men's choir in Mörsil church. An internet search of Bengt Bixo will disclose some of his compositions. All ten of his and Kerstin's children studied voice, and some studied violin under his direction. During a family visit to Åkersberga in July 2013, his youngest son Anders (b. 1922) showed us his father's favorite violin, made by his own hand, a family heirloom. In the 1920s, his fourth-oldest son Daniel (1904–1977) accompanied him on concert tours in Jämtland and Härjedalen.⁴ Bengt was fond of humoresque—a playful medley of folk tunes popularized by Antonín Dvoŕák. In Scandinavian musicology, Bengt Bixo is cited as a violinist whose music influenced other composers.⁵

During the weeks spent with Nels and his son, Arvid, in